Ecommerce SEO with Product Buying Guides; How to Increase Ranks, Traffic, and Conversions Using Buying Guides

As an e-commerce brand, you have the ability to sell products to people all over the world. The Internet has made it possible for you to operate.

But this means that you’re no longer competing with just a few other local businesses in a small town. You’re competing against other e-commerce shops as well as the retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Wayfair.

With so much competition, you need to find a competitive edge today more than ever before.

The first thing you need to do is recognize the buying behavior of consumers. Since they are presented with so many options for the same or similar products, how do they decide where to buy?

According to a recent study, 71% of consumers use search engines to discover new products.

74% of consumers use search engines during the consideration and purchasing stages of the conversion funnel as well.

I know that the majority of you are running social media campaigns to drive traffic to your website, which is definitely something you should continue doing. But as you can see from the figures above, search engines heavily outrank social searches.

For starters, each time you publish a new buying guide you’re adding fresh content to your website, which is known to help with SEO. They are typically longer forms of content, meaning you’ll have more characters and words on your website.

Buying guides are recognizably original as well. You’ll have the opportunity to pack these guides full of relevant keywords related to your niche and improve your link-building strategy.

Here’s a great example of a niche product buying guide from All Things Barbecue.

As the name implies, All Things Barbecue is obviously already in a niche category of their own.

However, they take this buying guide one step further by positioning it as gift ideas for Father’s day. The section above that I highlighted goes even deeper into that niche with a product buying guide for grills.

Do you want to use gas, charcoal, ceramic, or pellet? What type of meat will be cooked? Which option delivers the best value?

All of these questions are answered in the buying guide.

As we continue through this article, I’ll show you some more great examples of product buying guides that you can use as a reference.

Content Creation

Now that you’ve recognized the importance of having product buying guides on your website, it’s time to write them. So fire up your computer and start writing, right?

Not so fast.

Your product buying guides won’t be effective if they’re not written properly. So make sure you find someone with writing talent to complete these tasks for you. If your guides are full of spelling mistakes, grammar issues, and aren’t formatted properly, they will do you more harm than good.

In addition to finding someone with exceptional writing skills, the person who creates this content also needs to be familiar with your industry and Google.

They need to be educated on what they’re writing about. Plus, the guides need to be written in a way that appeals to search engines.

Your buying guides don’t need to be so black and white. Come up with creative ways to make this content appeal to your niche.

Focus on trends or recent news topics as inspiration for your buying guides.

Let’s take a look at another example. Research shows that the residential electricity rates have increased by about 24% over the last ten years.

This isn’t necessarily groundbreaking information, but it’s a trend that’s worth noting if your ecommerce brand is in certain industries.

With energy costs on the rise, consumers are more conscious and price-sensitive when it comes to buying products that can impact their utility bills.

In order to properly create these guides, the writer must be knowledgeable about the products.

They also need to be able to convey this information to the consumers in a way that’s easy to comprehend, while still focusing on SEO.

Checklists and bullet points work great for this.

Avoid huge blocks of text. You want your guides to be easy to scan. Why is this so important?

Well, according to Forbes, only 16% of people read online content word-for-word. 79% of people just scan through it.

Your tone is another major component of writing these buying guides.

It’s important to make sure that you’re unbiased, even though you obviously are. You want your customers to buy something from your website as opposed to your competitors, so you need to be sure that the guides make it as easy as possible for them to do that.

Budget Options

For example, let’s say your ecommerce shop sells mattresses. The prices of this type of product range from anywhere from a few hundred dollars to upward of $10,000.

You can have a section of your buying guide that explains the differences in these prices.

What’s the price difference between a full size and a king size? At what price point can you buy a mattress with an adjustable remote option?

These are all things that would be included in this section.

This will really help you in terms of your SEO strategy as well. You’ve got to think about the way people search for things on Google.

If someone runs a search for “best mattress under $1,000” and your buying guide has a section with this header, it increases the chances that you’ll be a top search result.

Niche Products

We talked about niche earlier, and I’ve mentioned this concept a few times since. But I want to break this concept down even further.

As I just explained with the mattress example, if you can create headings within your buying guide that appeal to certain niches, it will improve your buying guide. This goes far beyond just highlighting different price points.

For example, let’s say your ecommerce store is in the outdoors niche. You target customers who like camping, fishing, hiking, kayaking, and other similar activities.

If you’re writing a product buying guide for something like hiking boots, you can segment your headers by categories within that niche.

Best hiking boots for cold weather

Best hiking shoes for mountains

Best waterproof hiking boots

These are all examples of categories that could be included in your buying guide.

By including as many segmentations as possible, your guide will appeal to a wider audience and increase the chances that more consumers will find what they’re looking for on your website.

Key Considerations to Look For

Your product buying guides need to educate consumers. You need to tell them what to look for when shopping for specific products.

Let’s say you sell electronics through your ecommerce platform. You could have a buying guide about wifi extenders.

Some key considerations to look for would be:

Size of home

Ease of setup

Signal speed

Compatibility with existing equipment

Streaming needs

These are all factors that the consumer might not keep in mind when they’re shopping unless you remind them to.

Here’s a great example of this on a microwave buying guide from Best Buy.

As you can see, they cover a wide range of features that the consumer should be looking for when buying their microwave.

Photos

Your buying guide needs to have images.

It’s one thing to tell people something, but showing them makes it that much better.

Research shows that 75% of consumers say that visual content inspires them to make purchases.

Internal Linking

Your buying guide needs to include relevant internal links. This is another important component of your SEO strategy.

Add internal links that bring readers to a specific product that fits the description of what you’re writing about in your guide.

You can include links to relevant blog posts as well.

SEO

We’ve been talking about SEO and its importance throughout this article. But I wanted to just briefly dive a little bit deeper into the topic.

If you refer back to everything I just said for what should be included in your product buying guide, all of these elements will help with your SEO strategy.

Generic keywords are too competitive. You will have a tough time getting a high ranking if you’re just using generic search terms.

If you’re paying for keywords with PPC campaigns, the cost for broad and competitive words will be significantly higher as well.

Even if you manage to get a high ranking, the traffic won’t be targeted the same way as it would for long-tail keywords.

When someone searches for terms that are more specific, it increases your chances of getting them to click and convert.

That’s why these guides are so great for SEO and Google.

Conversions

As I just said, the SEO components of product buying guides will help you get more conversions.

Again, keep the customer conversion funnel in mind. You need to funnel the user to where they need to go to complete a transaction after reading your guide.

Here are some of the best ways to help you drive conversions.

Reviews

90% of consumers read reviews online before buying something.

84% of people say they trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation from a friend or family member.

Knowing this information, you shouldn’t make your website visitors navigate to another page or website just to read product reviews. Include these in your buying guide as well so they can get everything from one place.

As a result, it will help you drive conversions.

Statistics and References

Some products and industries will have statistics associated with them. You should include these in the buying guides to educate your readers.

Think back to some of the examples that we looked at so far.

If you’re writing a buying guide about a product that will help you save energy in your home, including some energy statistics to back up your claims.

A buying guide about mattresses may include information about what percent of the population doesn’t sleep well at night or something along those lines.

Whenever you include statistics, you need to provide accurate references to legitimate sources.

This will increase your credibility and boost your chances of getting people to convert.

Market Trends and Ecommerce Data

You need to have a strategy before you start creating product buying guides.

Just because you sell certain products on your ecommerce platform, it doesn’t automatically mean that you should write a buying guide about them right away.

You need to analyze your ecommerce data and review the latest market trends.

Find out what people are buying and searching for based on this information. Then prioritize those guides accordingly.

Ultimately, this will help enhance the usability of the products that you’re writing about and lead to conversions.

A Global Perspective

With an ecommerce business, you can reach anyone in the world who has Internet access.

But with that said, based on the size of your business and other factors, you may not necessarily be targeting, shipping, or selling to everyone in the world.

Take a look at this graphic above. Based on these numbers, you should be targeting regions with the highest percentage of Internet penetration by population.

There is a direct correlation between these figures and the consumer spending power.

In 2018, you’ll want to create buying guides mainly for consumers in the US, Canada, and Europe.

But the needs of a consumer in the United States may vary from the needs of a consumer in Europe, so you just need to plan accordingly and make sure that you are appealing to the right audience.

Conclusion

One of the best ways to improve your ecommerce SEO strategy is with product buying guides.